About – Michael Ewens

About

I am the David L. and Elsie M. Dodd Professor of Finance at Columbia Business School’s finance division. I research the financing of high-growth startups and financial intermediation via venture capital and private equity. My research aims to understand if and how financial intermediaries in private equity add value, and when they do, what that teaches us about financing and operational frictions faced by companies. I am also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), associate editor of the Review of Financial Studies, associate editor at the Journal of Financial Economics, co-editor of the Journal of Economics & Management Strategy and Associate Editor at the Journal of Corporate Finance. I edited the 2023 Special Issue on Private Equity published in the Journal of Corporate Finance.

I have taught venture capital and private equity finance at the undergraduate and masters level at Columbia Business School, California Institute of Technology, Wharton School, Carnegie Mellon University and University of California San Diego. These courses include Entrepreneurial Finance (Columbia MBA), Venture Capital Finance (CMU MBA, Caltech), Private Equity Finance (CMU MBA) and Empirical Methods (CMU, Caltech PhD).

I received my economics PhD from the University of California, San Diego in 2010. Since 2006 I have worked as a quantitative advisor for Correlation Ventures, a quantitative-focused venture capital firm based in San Diego, CA.

From 2010 to 2014, I was on the faculty at Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University and from 2014 – 2022 I was on the faculty at Caltech as a Professor of Finance and Entrepreneurship. I co-organize the Columbia Private Equity Conference (with Arthur Kortweg (USC), Song Ma (Yale), and Rick Townsend (UCSD)), the virtual Workshop on Entrepreneurial Finance and Innovation (with Camille Hebert (Univ. of Toronto), Song Ma (Yale) and Melanie Wallskog (Duke)) and mentor PhD students in the WEFI Fellows program.

CONTACT

DOWNLOAD CV

Research

My research studies the financial intermediation, innovation and management of high-growth entrepreneurial firms. In this environment which is characterized by extreme agency and information frictions, one can revisit fundamental issues in finance and economics. I am particularly interested in the source of value-add of financial intermediaries such as venture capitalists and private equity investors, the role of gender in entrepreneurship (see my lecture here) and the differences between public and private ownership forms. All projects attempt to create new large sample data where earlier research had only a few industries or short time periods.

Google Scholar

GitHub (code and data)

NBER page

SSRN Working Papers page

Publications

ALL RESEARCH

Private or public equity? The evolving entrepreneurial finance landscape

Michael Ewens and Joan Farre-Mensa (Univ. IL Chicago), Annual Review of Financial Economics

Forthcoming

Venture Capital Contracts

Michael Ewens, Alexander Gorbenko (UCL) and Arthur Korteweg (USC Marshall), Journal of Financial Economics Volume 143, Issue 1, January 2022, Pages 131-158

Research

Publications

Private or public equity? The evolving entrepreneurial finance landscape

Venture Capital Contracts

The Deregulation of the Private Equity Markets and the Decline in IPOs

Are Early Stage Investors Biased Against Women?

Founder Replacement and Startup Performance

Cost of Experimentation and the Evolution of Venture Capital

Managing Performance Signals Through Delay: Evidence from Venture Capital

Is the VC Partnership Greater than the Sum of its Partners?

Statistical Discrimination or Prejudice? A Large Sample Field Experiment

The Price of Diversifiable Risk in Venture Capital and Private Equity